Moonwar gt-7

by Ben Bova

  “That’s enough to do the job,” Anson said. To Doug. She pointedly kept from looking at Gordette.

  Staring at the mass of vehicles parked out on the open mare, Doug muttered, “What we need is a good solar flare to knock out them out.”

  “That would only postpone the inevitable,” Anson said.

  Doug looked at her, sitting behind her desk. “Jinny, you used to be a lot of fun to talk to. You’re getting morose.”

  “Yeah, I’ve noticed that, too,” she answered, straight-faced. “Wonder why?”

  “How old is this information?” Doug asked, pointing at the wallscreen.

  “This is real-time,” she said. “The bird’s made four passes over the region, so far.”

  “And they haven’t tried to blind it or knock it off the air?”

  “Why bother?” Gordette said. “If I was running their operation, I’d want you to see how much stuff we got.”

  “It is kinda depressing,” Anson agreed. Again, without looking Gordette’s way.

  “Who else has seen this?” Doug asked.

  “Nobody,” she replied sharply. “The bits are transmitted from the satellite to our computer and straight to my office. That’s why I asked you to come here and see it. Not even Harry Clemens is getting this data.”

  “Good,” Doug said. “It certainly is depressing.”

  “Three hundred troopers,” Anson mused. “With missiles and all the other goodies.”

  “Well,” Doug said, trying to brighten the mood, “at least we know they’re still at Copernicus. They’re not on their way here yet.”

  “Take ’em about two days to cover the distance?” Gordette asked.

  “Just about,” Doug replied.

  “Two Earth days,” Arisen said. “Forty-eight hours. Maybe a little less if they push it.”

  Steepling his fingers almost as if in prayer, Gordette said, “Well, if they’re gonna knock out your satellite it’ll be just before they haul ass and start on their way here.”

  “Why bother?”

  “Standard operating procedure. No commander wants the enemy watching his route of march, if he can help it.”

  Anson looked from Gordette to the wall screen and back again. “So if our bird goes off the air…”

  “That means they’re starting on their way here,” Doug finished for her.

  As if on cue, the wallscreen display broke into wild jagged streaks and then went blank.

  The three of them rushed down to the control center, once they were certain that the reconnaissance satellite had actually been knocked out, and the dead wallscreen wasn’t merely a malfunction somewhere in the communications system.

  “You want to launch another recce bird?” Anson asked as they dashed along the corridor, hurrying past startled people.

  “Not much sense to that,” Doug said over his shoulder.

  “Yeah,” Gordette agreed. “Just be target practice for them.”

  The control center was calm, with its usual air of controlled intensity, the quiet hum of consoles, the flickering of display screens in the dimly-lit chamber. Doug automatically glanced at the big wallscreen that displayed a schematic of the entire base. The usual scattering of red and yellow lights, but otherwise everything was operating normally.

  Doug knew from hours of studying the ballistics that a nuclear-tipped missile could be launched from the L-1 station and reach Moonbase in less than an hour. Even faster if the Peacekeepers wanted to goose it, but Doug thought that they would want to take at least an hour so that they would have time to make pinpoint mid-course corrections. If his reasoning was correct, they would want the nuke to go off over the solar farms inside Alphonsus’s ringwall after the Peacekeeper assault force had arrived on the other side of the mountains, shielded from the nuke’s radiation pulse, and ready to cross Wodjohowitcz Pass as soon as the explosion had knocked out Moonbase’s main electrical power supply.

  The radar view of L-1 showed the same cluster of spacecraft hovering around the space station that Doug had seen the last time he’d looked.

  “Can we get a visual?” he asked Jinny. “Turn one of the astronomical’scopes on it?”

  She nodded and walked off toward the technician who was monitoring the automated astronomical equipment sitting out by the central peak in the middle of Alphonsus.

  Edith came tearing into the control center, breathless.

  “Doug,” she said, puffing as she skidded to a stop next to him, “McGrath wants me to pipe the battle Earthside in real time!”

  “Who’s McGrath?”

  “The top boss! He owns Global News!”

  Doug shifted mental gears as fast as he could; still, it took a few moments for him to realize what Edith was telling him.

  “You’ll show what’s happening here when the Peacekeepers attack?”

  “To the whole blazin’ world!” Edith said, exultant.

  For the first time in what seemed like years, Doug felt a genuine smile curving his lips. “Faure’s not going to like that… not at all.”

  Through her sitting room window, Joanna could see a soft twilight descending on the garden and the woods beyond it. The trees had been planted there to cover up the view of Savannah’s skyline and give the occupants of her house the feeling that they were truly out in the countryside rather than half a mile from the Interstate.

  “Global’s going to broadcast the confrontation?” she asked Doug’s image, grinning at her from the Windowall screen above the fireplace. She could not bear to use the word battle or attack. She knew that Moonbase could not win a battle or survive an attack.

  “Edan McGrath himself called Edith and asked her to do it,” Doug said after the three-second lag. “Real-time coverage; blow by blow.”

  “I’ve already got a pocketful of senators demanding an investigation of the President’s handling of the Moonbase crisis,” Joanna mused. “Coverage of the confrontation will show the voting public how you’re being attacked by the U.N.’s Peacekeepers.”

  “This has got to stay confidential,” Doug was saying, not waiting for her response. “We don’t want Faure to know about it beforehand.”

  Joanna’s brows knit. “But, Doug, maybe if we leaked the information Faure would call off the attack.”

  She watched her son’s image in the display screen. Once he heard her words he shook his head. “The Peacekeepers are already on their way here, Mom. No one’s going to call off the attack. Not now.”

  Alarm tingled through Joanna like an electric current. “You’re certain?”

  “In forty-eight hours or less we’ll be able to see them coming across Mare Nubium.”

  Joanna suddenly felt as if someone had ripped out her insides. All these weeks she had known it would come to this, yet she realized now that she had desperately clung to an unconscious hope that it could all be averted.

  “You’ll have to surrender to them, then,” she said dully.

  Three seconds passed. Doug replied, “Maybe.”

  “You can’t fight them! You don’t have any weapons.”

  Again the agonizing wait. Doug said, “We don’t have any guns, that’s true enough. But we’re not beaten yet.”

  “Doug, what are you thinking of? You can’t fight an armed battalion of trained Peacekeeper troops! You’ll get yourself killed! You’ll destroy Moonbase!”

  He hadn’t waited for her response. He was saying, in a calm, carefully measured tone. “I can’t tell you what we’re planning, Mom, because even a tight laser link spreads enough for some snooper to eavesdrop. But we’re not going to obediently open our hatches and let the Peacekeepers take over Moonbase.”

  “Doug, they’ll kill you!”

  He smiled at her words. “If we surrender and have to return Earthside, I’m a dead man anyway.”

  Joanna started to reply, then realized that her son was right. He had nothing to lose by fighting for Moonbase.

  “Naw, I don’t mind working the night shift,” Killifer was saying. “At le
ast I’ll be indoors, under the roof, if it rains.”

  The security chief looked slightly uneasy. “I don’t usually put newcomers inside the house,” he said, “but Jonesie’s come down with some virus and we need a replacement for him right away.”

  “It’s okay,” Killifer repeated, trying hard not to sound eager. I’ll take his shift.”

  “You already did you regular shift; I don’t like asking you to double up.”

  Killifer shrugged as carelessly as he could. “Four to midnight is easy. I wouldn’t go to sleep until after midnight, anyway.”

  The chief swivelled back and forth slowly in his desk chair, making it squeak slightly, eying Killifer as if he weren’t certain he was doing the right thing. Killifer sat in front of the little desk, doing his best to appear nonchalant.

  Then he got an inspiration. “I get overtime pay for this, don’t I?”

  The chief visibly relaxed. “Yeah, sure. Time and a half.”

  Killifer nodded as if the money was his reason for agreeing to the extra shift so readily. “Double shift isn’t so bad,” he said. “It’s only for a few days, right?”

  “Yeah,” said the chief. “Until Jonesie comes back.”

  “I’d just be spending my pay in some bar or someplace,” Killifer said. “This way I make plastic instead of spending it.”

  “All right,” the chief said, still uneasy. “Go downstairs and change into a regular uniform. You work with Rodriguez. He monitors the screens, in here, and you sit in the kitchen until she and her husband go to bed. Then you patrol the rooms once every half-hour. Check all the windows and doors. Except the master bedroom; just make sure their door’s shut tight. Pay particular attention to the sliders that go out to the pool deck.”

  “Right.” Killifer nodded.

  “Remember, she doesn’t like to see us. Stay in the kitchen until they go up to the master bedroom.”

  “What about the butler?”

  “He’ll go to bed after they do,” said the chief.

  “Okay. Good.”

  Again the chief hesitated. Killifer could feel his pulse throbbing in his ears as he sat facing the man across the pathetic little metal desk.

  At last the chief said, “All right. Go downstairs and get into your uniform.”

  Killifer got up from his chair slowly, turned and went to the office door.

  “And thanks for filling in,” the chief said. Reluctantly.

  “Nothing to it,” Killifer replied over his shoulder. He pulled the door open, then added, “I can use the extra plastic.”

  The bastard suspects something, Killifer said to himself as he stepped out into the hallway. Not enough to turn me down, but this doesn’t sit right with him.

  Then he grinned as he clattered down the metal spiral staircase. What the hell! Let him worry all he wants to. I’m in the house for two to three nights and she’s home with her creaky old man. Once the butler goes to bed I’ll scope out the house and figure out the best way to get to her and then get away. Shit, they’ll be paying me to do it. Overtime.

  NANOLAB

  Keiji Inoguchi was surprised by Professor Zimmerman’s call. He hurried to the nanolab, eager to accept Zimmerman’s invitation before the crusty old man changed his mind.

  “I am most honored that you have asked me to visit your laboratory once again,” he said, after he had bowed to the professor.

  Zimmerman dipped his chin in acknowledgement. “I am asking for more than a visit, my friend. I need your help.”

  Inoguchi sucked in his breath. “My help? In what way can I help you?”

  Zimmerman led the Japanese scientist back into the bowels of his lab. They walked past rows of computer screens and gray, bulky cryogenic tanks beaded with moisture, Zimmerman in his usual gray suit, grossly overweight, dishevelled, looking distracted and unhappy; Inoguchi in an immaculate white turtleneck shirt and sharply-creased slacks, lean and eager, his eyes snapping up every piece of equipment as if they were cameras.

  Hands jammed in his trouser pockets, Zimmerman said heavily, “I am relegated to assisting my former student, Professor Cardenas.”

  “Yes?”

  “She has asked me to prepare nanomachines capable of repairing wounds inflicted by gunshot or shrapnel—flying metal from explosions.”

  “And you want me to assist you in this?” Inoguchi asked.

  “I realize you represent the United Nations and are not to take part in the fighting,” Zimmerman said. “But for medical work perhaps you are allowed to use your skills, yah? For humanitarian reasons.”

  “Of course,” Inoguchi said without an instant’s hesitation. “Humanitarian purposes come before politics and other considerations.”

  Zimmerman stopped in front of a lab bench that supported a massive metal sphere connected to a desktop computer by hair-thin fiber optic cables.

  “My staff,” Zimmerman gestured to the sphere.

  Inoguchi understood immediately. “Your processors.”

  “Yah,” said Zimmerman, lowering his bulk onto a spindly-looking stool. “Now we must teach them to build other nanos that will seal wounds quick, before the patient bleeds to death.”

  “Can you do this?”

  The old man nodded slowly. “Yah. I have already done it once. Now I must do it again—in a day or so.”

  Inoguchi grinned at the professor. “We have much work to accomplish, then.”

  Colonel Giap did not relish being under Faure’s direct supervision. The man is a politician, what doeshe know of military tactics? Giap asked himself. I should report to General Uhlenbeck, through the normal chain of command. Instead I must bear with this politician questioning every breath I draw.

  He tried to reassure himself with Clausewitz’s dictum that war is merely an extension of politics. It was scant consolation. Yes, politicians such as Ho Chi Minh successfully directed the liberation of Vietnam from the imperialists, he knew. But that was generations ago, and besides, Ho and his comrades had military experience of their own. Faure had probably never even fired a pistol at a target range.

  “Was it wise to incapacitate their satellite?” the U.N. secretary-general was asking.

  Giap, sitting on the bare floor of his closet-turned-office, replied to the image on his laptop’s screen with all the patience he could muster, “It was necessary. Their satellite could observe our time of departure and our route of march. That would be giving the enemy more information than we want them to have.”

  He waited the three seconds, watching Faure twiddle his moustache. Then the secretary-general replied, “But by disabling their satellite, you have told them that you are ready to march.”

  “Yes. What of it? Don’t you think they have cameras atop their ringwall mountains looking for us to appear over their horizon?”

  Faure’s face creased deeply once he heard Giap’s comment. “Then of what good was it to cripple their satellite? I do not understand your reasoning.”

  They went around the subject twice more, Giap resolute and implacable, Faure irritable and demanding.

  At last Giap said, “Sir, you may consider my action premature or even mistaken, but it has been done and argument will not undo it.”

  Faure flushed angrily once he heard the colonel’s words.

  Before he could say anything, Giap added, “If you wish to remove me from command, I understand entirely.”

  The secretary-general’s eyes widened momentarily, then he quickly asserted his self-control. Forcing a smile that narrowed his eyes to slits, Faure made a soothing gesture with both hands.

  “No, no, of course not, colonel. I have every confidence in you.”

  Of course you do, Giap said to himself, now that our jump-off for the attack is only hours away.

  “What you’re looking at,” said Edith into her pin mike, “is almost certainly a nuclear-armed missile.”

  The monitor screen in the little editing booth showed what Moonbase’s astronomical telescope was focused upon: the clutch of spacec
raft hovering around the big space station at the L-1 libration point some fifty-eight thousand kilometers above the Moon’s surface. The picture, with Edith’s commentary, was being broadcast live over Global News Network.

  “Despite international agreements that date all the way back to 1967 banning nuclear weapons in space, the United Nations has brought a nuclear-armed missile here to use against Moonbase. Although Moonbase’s residents…”

  Doug watched Edith’s performance as he suited up for another surface excursion. It’s one thing to reveal to the world that Faure’s going to nuke our solar energy farms, he told himself, it’s something else to try to knock out the missile once they launch it against us.

  Doug hitched a ride on one of the tractors carrying a team of construction workers out to the mass driver. It took the better part of half an hour to trundle the few kilometers in one of the electrically-driven tractors. Doug thought that once this war was over, one of his immediate priorities was going to be developing faster ground vehicles. This is asinine, creaking along at a top speed of thirty klicks per hour.

  Then he realized that the Peacekeeper battalion was chugging along at pretty much the same low speed, and he didn’t feel so bad about it. Besides, he added silently, by the time this war is over there might not be a Moonbase and you just might be dead.

  The Sun was up over the ringwall mountains, bathing the crater floor in harsh, brilliant light that cast long slanting shadows. It would remain daylight for another twelve days. The Peacekeepers remembered that the nanobugs Moonbase had used against them the first time were deactivated by solar ultraviolet.

  The mass driver was crawling with spacesuited figures. Laser welding torches flashed against the dark bulk of the long metal machines. Doug clambered down from the tractor, leaving the construction team to drive a few hundred meters on, to where their cohorts were digging a trench for the prefab shelter for Wicksen’s people.

  The suit-to-suit radio frequency was alive with chatter, but Doug found Wicksen visually, from his slight form and the bright blue WIX stencilled on his backpack. There was so much crosstalk on the regular suit-to-suit frequency that Doug walked up to the physicist and tapped him lightly on the shoulder.